Stalker

‘I hit him,’ she whispers to herself.

She moistens her mouth, and in her mind’s eye sees herself firing and hitting him in the neck, arm and chest.

‘Three shots to the chest …’

She changed her magazine and shot him again when he’d fallen into the rapids, she held the flare up and saw the cloud of blood spread out around him. She ran along the bank, shooting at the dark object, and carried on firing even though the body had been carried off by the current.

I know I killed him, she thinks.

But they never found his body. The police sent divers under the ice, and checked both banks with sniffer-dogs.

Outside the office is a neat metal sign bearing his name and title: Nils Åhlén, Professor of Forensic Medicine.

The door is open, and the slight figure is sitting at his neat desk reading the newspaper with a pair of latex gloves on his hands. He’s wearing a white polo-neck shirt under his white coat, and his pilot’s sunglasses flash as he looks up.

‘You’re tired, Saga,’ he says amiably.

‘A bit.’

‘Beautiful, though.’

‘No.’

He puts the newspaper down, pulls off the gloves and notices the quizzical look in her eyes.

‘To save getting ink on my fingers,’ he says, as though it were obvious.

Saga doesn’t answer, just sets the jar down in front of him. The chopped-off finger moves slowly in the alcohol, through a cloud of wispy particles. A swollen and half-rotten index finger.

‘So you think that this finger belonged to …’

‘Jurek Walter,’ Saga says curtly.

‘How did you get hold of it?’ Nils Åhlén asks.

He picks up the jar and holds it up to the light. The finger falls against the inside of the glass as if it were pointing at him.

‘I’ve spent more than a year looking …’

To start with Saga Bauer borrowed sniffer-dogs and walked up and down both banks of the river, from Bergasjön all the way to Hysingsvik on the Baltic coast. She followed the shoreline, combed the beaches, studied the currents of Norrfjärden all the way down to Västerfladen, and made her way out to every island, talking to anyone who went fishing in the area.

‘Go on,’ Åhlén said.

She looks up and meets his relaxed gaze behind the shimmering surface of his sunglasses. His latex gloves are lying on the desk in front of him, inside out, in two little heaps. One is quivering slightly, either from a draught or because of the rubber contracting.

‘This morning I was walking along the beach out at Högmarsö,’ she explains. ‘I’ve been there before, but I gave it another go … the terrain on the north side is quite tricky, a lot of forest on the cliffs at the headland.’

She thinks of the old man walking towards her from the other direction with an armful of silver-grey driftwood.

‘You’ve gone quiet again.’

‘Sorry … I bumped into a retired church warden … he said he’d seen me the last time I was there, and asked what I was looking for.’

Saga went with him to the inhabited part of the island. Less than forty people live there. The warden’s house is tucked behind the white chapel and freestanding bell tower.

‘He said he found a dead body on the shore towards the end of April …’

‘A whole body?’ Åhlén asks in a low voice.

‘No, just the torso and one arm.’

‘No head?’

‘No one can live without a torso,’ she says, and can hear how agitated her voice sounds.

‘No,’ Åhlén replies calmly.

‘The warden said the body must have been in the water all winter, because it was badly swollen, and very heavy.’

‘They look terrible,’ Åhlén said.

‘He brought the body back through the forest in his wheelbarrow, and laid it on the floor of the tool-shed behind the chapel … but the smell drove his dog mad, so he had to take it to the old crematorium.’

‘He cremated it?’

She nods. The crematorium had been abandoned for decades, but in the middle of the overgrown foundations was a sooty brick oven with a chimney. The warden used to burn rubbish in the oven, so he knew it worked.

‘Why didn’t he call the police?’ Åhlén asked.

Saga thinks of the way the churchwarden’s house stank of fried food and old clothes. His neck was streaked with dirt and the bottles of home-brew in the fridge had dirty marks from his fingers.

‘He had a still at home … I don’t know. But he did take a few pictures with his mobile in case the police showed up and started asking questions … and he kept the finger at the bottom of his fridge.’

‘Have you got the pictures?’

‘Yes,’ she says, and pulls out her phone. ‘It must be him … look at the gunshot wounds.’

Åhlén looks at the first picture. On the bare cement floor of the tool-shed lies a bloated, marbled torso with just one arm. The skin has split across the chest and slipped down. There are four ragged gunshot holes on the body. The water has made a black mark on the pale grey floor – a shadow that gets narrower towards the drain in the floor.

‘That looks good, very good,’ Nils Åhlén said, handing her phone back.

There is a tense look in his eyes as he gets to his feet and picks the glass jar up from the desk, and he looks at her as if he were about to say something else, but walks out of the room instead.

20 (#ulink_f17196a2-5d75-5c0f-96a5-14275ed728ad)

Saga follows Nils Åhlén through a dark corridor with narrow wheel-tracks on the floor, into the closest pathology lab. The chilly fluorescent lights in the ceiling flicker a few times before settling and lighting up the white tiled walls. Beside one of the metal tables is a desk with a computer and a large bottle of Trocadero.

The room smells of disinfectant and drains. A bright yellow hose is attached to one of the taps. A trickle of water runs from the end of the hose towards the drain in the floor.